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Loren Goldner’s Website
One good link is often enough. For example, in my “Situationist Bibliography” page I have linked to only one other “situ” site (Situationist International Online) because that site includes virtually all the situationist texts in English on the Web as well as links to most of the other situationist or would-be situationist sites. Similarly, the Loren Goldner site that I discuss below includes links to several of the main ultraleftist sites (council communists, non-Bolshevik Marxists, etc.). By checking the links pages at those sites you can find many more ultraleftist sites, as well as some anarchist pages; exploring the latter you will soon discover lists of hundreds of anarchist sites; in some of those you will come upon links to a variety of more or less related movements (ecology actions, prisoner support, anticorporate protests, alternative communities). . . . Amid this overwhelming abundance of information and contacts it’s important to remember the limits of the medium. The Internet is very useful for brief texts and communications, especially when timeliness is important (news, notices, networking, ongoing projects), or for archiving longer texts that are out of print. It’s not a good place for serious study. It’s ridiculous to imagine that you will get anything out of Homer or Gibbon or Murasaki, or anything else with any depth and subtlety, by clicking to a webpage and glancing at a few “graphically enhanced” excerpts. If you want to find out about Marxism or anarchism or the situationists, you should get books by Marx, Kropotkin, Debord, etc., read them carefully, discuss them, criticize them, try putting their valid aspects into practice, then go back and reread them in the light of those experiments. Only when you have become somewhat familiar with them does it make sense to check the Web for additional texts by or about them, or to find others who share your interest. * * * One site I would like to recommend is Loren Goldner’s “Break Their Haughty Power” (http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner). Loren’s perspective might generally be characterized as ultraleftist, but he has a broader cultural awareness than most ultraleftists and more familiarity with the situationists (he translated a couple SI books back in the early 1970s). The site has only been up a couple months, but it already includes a wide-ranging collection of texts he has written over the last three decades — a book on the 1974-1977 radical struggles in Portugal and Spain; a critical appreciation of the Indian group Kamunist Kranti (known in the West for their booklet “A Ballad Against Work”); critiques of postmodernism and “multiculturalism”; and articles on Marx, Bordiga, the 1960s’ impact on literature, and last year’s WTO protest in Seattle. There are a number of convergences with my own writings, all the more interesting because they have been arrived at independently. Two of his articles (“The Renaissance and Rationality” and “Afro-Anabaptist-Indian Fusion”) help clarify one of the factors underlying the European situationists’ blindspot regarding religion which I discussed in The Realization and Suppression of Religion; and his interview with a participant in a little-known radical situation in the Boston area illustrates some of the points I made in chapter 3 of The Joy of Revolution. The only text that I found more trouble than it was worth was the book-length piece on the “Restructuring of Global Capital.” Though it may be a reflection of my relative ignorance in this area, it seems to me that the pertinent points could have been presented more clearly and far more briefly. While there may be some value in refuting sophisticated economic ideologists on their own terrain, in practice most economic debate only serves to muddle the issues and to intimidate people, giving them the impression that everything hinges on the obscure workings of “the economy.” As Marx himself stressed, people make their own history, even if they are obliged to make it within the material limits of the society in which they find themselves. Moreover, as I noted in “The Joy of Revolution”: “Fortunately, we no longer have to worry about this question. Whatever possibilities there may or may not have been in the past, present material conditions are more than sufficient to sustain a global classless society.” The fact that the present social order is dominated by the economy does not mean that our revolt against that order must also be dominated by it. Loren himself does not fall for that common fallacy, but his partial acceptance of the style and terrain of leftist-academic discourse may sometimes give that impression. Some of Loren’s articles are a bit dated; others are previously unpublished manuscripts that he is in the process of reworking; and they could all use some more careful proofreading. But there’s not a single text at his site from which I didn’t learn something new and interesting. There are very few websites about which I can say that. KEN KNABB
Published online only. No copyright.
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